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To say that the illustrations to Lucile in the latest edition are good enough for the book is not to condemn either the poetry or the pictures, but to hint at the influence which the work to be illustrated ordinarily has over the mind of the artists who are called upon to furnish the illustrations. The easygoing, business-like verse of Owen Meredith and the well-controlled story reappear in the abundant illustrations which accompany this agreeable-looking volume. The little poetic flourishes are represented by clever vignettes, which give a curl to the printed lines without interrupting them; the airy guidebook passages have architectural and landscape views, generally devoid of any special imaginative quality, -- even Mr. Moran's gorgeousness seems to be tamed into place; the personages have the same well-dressed, decorous, and half private-theatrical air. It cannot be said that the figure subjects are the most successful, and the frontispiece is unhappily chosen, for there are better pictures in the book; but the artists seem generally to have drawn their inspiration from the text, and the stream can scarcely be expected to rise above the source. The popularity of Lucile, however, must be taken as justification for so profuse illustration, and there is as little to offend good taste in the pictures as in the poetry. Further than that we cannot bring ourselves to go.

Notice in the "Editor's Literary Record."
Harper's New Monthly Magazine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882) 64; p473

Few poems are more suggestive of pictorial embellishment than Owen Meredith's (Sir E.R. Bulwer-Lytton) delightful narrative and dramatic poem Lucile, and few have been mor worthily and ornately illustrated than this edition just published by Messrs. James R. Osgood and Co., of Boston. The poem abounds in graphic descriptions of grand or picturesque scenery and in highly dramatic incidents and situations, and these, combined with the poet's exquisite conception of womanly beauty, purity, and power in the person of the heroine, afford numberless opportunities for the genius of the painter to vie with, or at least to suitably interpret, the genius of the poet. The illustrations comprise twelve superb full-page engravings and one hundred and fifty smaller ones, from drawings by Mary Hallock Foote, E.H. Garrett, E.P. Hayden, L.S. Ipsen, E.F. Lummis, Thomas Moran, J.E. Palmer, Granville Perkins, James D. Smillie, A.R. Wand, W.P. Snyder, and other artists. The engravings are by A.V.S. Anthony, John Andrew and Son, T. Cole, W.B. Closson, W.J. Dana, W,J. Linton, W.H. Morse, N. Orr, G.C. Lowenthal, F.S. King, R. Varley, J. Karst, W.M. Tenny, and G. Kruell.

For other notices of Osgood's Holiday edition, see Sightings.

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